The Meaning of Rice

by Michael Booth

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Michael Booth

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1 The Return

  Okinawa

  Chapter 2 Sweet Potatoes

  Chapter 3 Umi Budo

  Chapter 4 Awamori

  Kyushu

  Chapter 5 Pork

  Chapter 6 Shochu

  Chapter 7 Nori

  Chapter 8 Obama

  Chapter 9 Sugar

  Chapter 10 Burgers

  Chapter 11 Arita

  Chapter 12 Tare

  Chugoku

  Chapter 13 Clams

  Kansai

  Chapter 14 Rotten Fish

  Chapter 15 Osaka

  Chapter 16 Osaka Take Two

  Shikoku

  Chapter 17 Yuzu

  Chubu

  Chapter 18 The Greatest Restaurant in the World

  Chapter 19 Insects

  Chapter 20 Wine

  Tokyo

  Chapter 21 Ramen

  Chapter 22 Tea

  Chapter 23 Soba

  Chapter 24 Sushi

  Chapter 25 Curry Rice

  Chapter 26 Yakitori

  Chapter 27 Yanagihara

  Chapter 28 Cake

  Chubu/Tohoku

  Chapter 29 Mochi

  Chapter 30 Koji

  Chapter 31 Rice (Meaning of …)

  Hokkaido

  Chapter 32 Uni

  Chapter 33 Whisky

  Chapter 34 Melons

  Chapter 35 Bears

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  In this often hilarious yet deeply researched book, food and travel writer Michael Booth and his family embark on an epic journey the length of Japan to explore its dazzling food culture. They find a country much altered since their previous visit ten years earlier (which resulted in the award-winning international bestseller Sushi and Beyond).

  Over the last decade the country’s restaurants have won a record number of Michelin stars and its cuisine was awarded United Nations heritage status. The world’s top chefs now flock to learn more about the extraordinary dedication of Japan’s food artisans, while the country’s fast foods – ramen, sushi and yakitori – have conquered the world. As well as the plaudits, Japan is also facing enormous challenges. Ironically, as Booth discovers, the future of Japan’s culinary heritage is under threat.

  Often venturing far off the beaten track, the author and his family discover intriguing future food trends and meet a fascinating cast of food heroes, from a couple lavishing love on rotten fish, to a chef who literally sacrificed a limb in pursuit of the ultimate bowl of ramen, and a farmer who has dedicated his life to growing the finest rice in the world… in the shadow of Fukushima. They dine in the greatest restaurant in the world, meet the world champion of cakes, and encounter wild bears. Booth is invited to judge the world sushi championship, ‘enjoys’ the most popular Japanese dish you have never heard of aboard a naval destroyer, and unearths the unlikely story of the Englishwoman who helped save the seaweed industry.

  Sushi and Beyond was also a bestseller in Japanese where its success has had improbable consequences for Booth and his family. They now star in their own popular cartoon series produced by national broadcaster NHK.

  About the Author

  Michael Booth is the author of five books, including the international bestseller, The Almost Nearly Perfect People, winner of the British Guild of Travel Writers award for Book of the Year, and Sushi and Beyond, which won the Guild of Food Writers award.

  Also by Michael Booth

  Just As Well I’m Leaving

  Doing without Delia

  Sushi and Beyond

  Eat, Pray, Eat

  The Almost Nearly Perfect People

  To my family

  ‘The whole of Japan is a pure invention .… There is no such country, there are no such people’.

  Oscar Wilde

  Chapter 1

  The Return

  A decade ago, in the autumn of 2007, I boarded a plane with my wife and our two sons and flew to Tokyo.

  We were living in Paris where I had spent twelve months learning the techniques of classical French cooking at the Cordon Bleu school and then working in Michelin-starred restaurants in the city. I had wanted to learn how to cook without recipes, without the guidance of Jamie, Delia or Nigella, and I did, but along the way I had consumed about as much butter, cream, sugar and pastry as any man’s elasticated waistband could accommodate. I was, if not jaded by dishes like blanquette de veau and lièvre à la royale, then definitely feeling the effects of the calorific overload brought on by an excess of classical French cooking. My stomach was now entering rooms before the rest of me. Bits kept moving after others had stopped.

  By way of an antidote, a friend had given me a copy of Shizuo Tsuji’s Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art, back then one of the few books on traditional Japanese cooking available in English. Its recipes – seasonal, light, healthy, modern and, as the title promised, simple – were a revelation.

  Inspired to find out more about what the Japanese ate and how they prepared it, I had booked four open tickets to Tokyo. My family and I ended up spending just over three months travelling the length of the country from Hokkaido in the chilly north to subtropical Okinawa in the south, exploring the dazzling diversity of Japan’s food culture, dining with sumo wrestlers, meeting Japan’s most famous food TV stars and discovering the secrets of how the centenarians of Okinawa lived well into three digits, among other adventures.

  I wrote a book about our journey, Sushi and Beyond, but, rather than getting Japan out of my system, the whole experience only made me more eager to return. A new world had opened up of unfamiliar ingredients and strange techniques, a world which was utterly alien, often tantalisingly inaccessible, yet never less than beguiling. From the edible aquarium that was Tsukiji fish market, to Tokyo’s smoky yakitori alleyways, I was captivated. From the minimalist kaiseki restaurants where I held my breath between courses for fear of disrupting the flower arrangements, to the ascetic temple food of Mount Koya, I was perplexed yet fascinated.

  I knew that on that first visit we had only really scratched the surface of Japan’s extraordinarily refined culinary landscape. We had visited fewer than a dozen of its forty-seven prefectures; so much about the Japanese – what they ate, and why – remained a mystery. That chronic sense of missing out had barely diminished over the years despite several return visits on my part to write food and travel stories for newspapers and magazines.

  In the decade since our first visit to Japan there had been several major developments on the country’s food scene. There were headlines around the world when, in 2007, the first Michelin guide to Tokyo awarded more of its precious stars to the Japanese capital than to Paris. Whatever one’s views of the value of Michelin, it seemed that Tokyo was now the world’s food capital, and subsequent guides, not just to the capital but to other Japanese cities, have reinforced the country’s status as the most starry in the culinary firmament. Then, in 2013, UNESCO granted Japanese cuisine ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage’ status. This also made headlines globally and, although I suspect it meant more to the Japanese than it did to the rest of the world, as a result still more foreign chefs have visited Japan in the years since and been inspired by Japanese techniques, ingredients and presentation styles. Japan is, for instance, the source of all the snazzy open-kitchen counter restaurants and fixed multi-course menus which have come to define ‘high-end’ dining in London, New York, Paris, Copenhagen and elsewhere; and the Japanese were doing the
local/seasonal thing long before anyone else. Meanwhile, the fooderati – bloggers, social media and conventional food media – had gone crazy for ramen, and were slowly discovering other Japanese fast foods and ingredients. Had this given the Japanese a new pride in their so-called ‘B-kyu gurume’ (B-class gourmet) foods about which Tsuji and Japan’s food elite had always tended to be rather sniffy? At least the Japanese had finally woken up to the branding potential of their food culture in terms of tourism and, as a result, there had been a record growth in foreign visitors in recent years, many of whom I suspect came primarily for its food. The tourist boom is likely to continue with the Olympics, awarded to Tokyo for 2020. How had the Japanese reacted to all this attention? How were its restaurants preparing to welcome the world, I wondered.

  On 11 March 2011 an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale struck just off the Pacific coast of eastern Japan, destroying entire towns and killing over 18,000 people. It was the most powerful earthquake ever to hit Japan and I suspect many around the world shared my horror as they watched the footage of the destruction of an entire region of the country. Since then, we have also witnessed the stoic resilience of the Japanese people in recovering from 3/11 but, among other things, the earthquake, tsunami and ensuing nuclear disaster devastated what had been an important food-producing region of Japan. What have been the long-term effects of the disaster?

  So, ten years since our first visit, it seemed time for my family and I to return to Japan for a new journey, to delve deeper into the country’s food culture, to see what we’d missed, and get to know the Japanese a little better.

  On landing in Tokyo, we will transfer straight to Okinawa, a three-hour flight south. After some days there we will head north to the first of Japan’s four main islands, Kyushu (the other three being Shikoku; the largest island, Honshu; and Hokkaido in the far north-east). Kyushu has been calling to me for years now. On that first trip we saw only Fukuoka in the north-east of the island, but ever since I had been hearing rumours that there were some extraordinary things to eat there. This time I want to drive from Kagoshima in the south up the western coast of Kyushu to, among other places, Nagasaki, which has a unique, internationally influenced cuisine dating back centuries. Crossing Kyushu, heading east, we will hop over to Honshu, the largest of the Japanese islands but, instead of then taking the more travelled Inland Sea coast route via Hiroshima to Osaka, we will travel along the Japan Sea coast through Shimane Prefecture. This is the ‘other’ Japan, a sparsely inhabited region rarely visited by Westerners; actually, it is rarely visited by the rest of the Japanese. On route from there to Tokyo we will stop in Kyoto to sample a rather fearful delicacy, as well as revisit Osaka, one of the most thrilling food cities in the world, from where I will take a detour to Shikoku.

  Nagoya, Gifu, Nagano and Japan’s wine region, Yamanashi, are all on our radar too; each of them has a range of weird and wonderful specialities. You could spend a lifetime eating in Tokyo, of course, but we will also see more of the prefectures of Kanto, eastern Honshu, including, of course, Fukushima. Finally, there will be Hokkaido – the ‘end of the world’ to many Japanese, beyond which lie frozen seas and frosty Russia. On our first trip to Hokkaido we had only seen the main city, Sapporo – lovely, lively and liveable, but really just the gateway to what I knew was one of the great landscapes, and the source of so much stunning produce and seafood.

  On that first visit almost ten years ago my sons, Asger, then six, and Emil, four, had been not much more than toddlers. Now teenagers, they have somehow managed to avoid reading Sushi and Beyond so their memories are based mostly on photographs and family mythology (‘Do you remember that time you pushed a sumo over in the training ring?’, ‘How we laughed when you projectile-vomited those fermented squid guts’, and so on). I was curious to see how their reaction to Japan might differ now they were proper humans, and in particular I had a feeling that Japan might offer a few worthwhile lessons for two boys heading rapidly towards manhood.

  There are a few qualities I have observed about the Japanese and their society over the years that I want my children to witness, characteristics that have struck me as impressive but increasingly rare in the West: things like dedication, duty, diligence, discipline, determination (for some reason, they all begin with the letter ‘d’). I wouldn’t say my children are particularly lacking in any of these but, equally, I reason, it won’t hurt to see them in action. So many people in the Japanese food world – chefs and food producers, artisans and farmers – have dedicated their lives to tending and perfecting their small patch of the culinary landscape without much consideration for wealth or adulation. Though it is true that my children will be missing some school to travel for around ten weeks in all (we live in Denmark where they are slightly more relaxed about this, as the Danes are about most things), I am convinced that there will be educational value enough in arranging for them to meet some of these ‘shokunin’, as such artisans, or craftsmen, are known in Japan, and watching them at work.

  The suitcases are waiting in the hall. I have taken out the rubbish, unplugged the TV, checked that the passports are where they should be in my bag five times now. I am just brushing my teeth one last time before we leave for the airport for our flight to Tokyo when my wife walks into the bathroom.

  ‘Have you seen this?’ she says, showing me her phone. ‘There’s been a major volcanic eruption in Kyushu. And North Korea has just launched a long-range missile test over Okinawa.’

  And so our journey begins.

  OKINAWA

  Chapter 2

  Sweet Potatoes

  The Queen of Okinawa is not happy.

  ‘Japan needs a detox. We have the highest levels of additives in our food in the world,’ she says, for some reason dropping a handful of dried chillis into the glowing hearth in front of us. Within a few seconds our eyes are streaming from the smoke. Hers remain unaffected.

  She exhales imperiously. ‘Our nutritionists in Japan are still telling us to eat margarine, so I don’t really trust their advice any more. My children have never eaten instant ramen or micro meals and, now, my guests are like my children. I opened this place to change the eating habits of the Okinawans.’ She sets four frothing glasses of a foaming, purple-coloured liquid before us. Emil’s nose twitches suspiciously.

  The last time we visited Okinawa, a decade ago, it was to uncover the secrets of the Okinawans’ longevity. The islands of Japan’s southernmost archipelago were becoming famous for having the greatest proportion of centenarians in the world. Gerontologists had been flocking there to find out why so many Okinawans lived beyond a hundred years. The reasons, we discovered, included strong social cohesion and genetics but in particular a diet which was low in fat with lots of seafood, tofu, seaweed and vegetables, along with specific additions like turmeric, jasmine tea and mineral-rich black sugar. Crucially, the Okinawans didn’t eat too much of anything. Calorific restriction, embodied by the local saying ‘hara hachi bu’ (eat until you are 80 per cent full), kept their intake much lower than the Western, or even the mainland Japanese average. But already the indicators for the future health of the islanders had been looking less rosy. The generations following those who had survived World War II were ditching the traditional Okinawan diet in favour of Western foods introduced by the occupying US forces: burgers, fried chicken, Spam, and the famous (and quite horrid) Okinawan taco rice. Today, the Okinawans are the biggest per capita consumers of KFC in Japan with a bucket of the Colonel’s chicken a common gift at parties, birthdays and – forget silver tankards – christenings. The younger generation of Okinawans are consuming considerably more calories than their parents, and exhibiting troubling levels of obesity, heart disease and diabetes as a result. In fact, as I was now learning, the Okinawans are the unhealthiest people in all Japan, and have lost their longevity crown to the prefecture of Nagano.

  ‘The most dramatic impact of the Western diet on the Japanese people has been felt here in Okinawa,’ the Queen
of Okinawa continues. ‘That’s because this is where the US military first came, and they have had this big base here ever since. The first fast food restaurants in Japan were here. The younger generation just don’t realise what they are doing.’

  The ‘Queen’, I should clarify, is Kiyoko Yamashiro, a sixteenth-generation descendant of ShÕ Hashi, the first king to unify the Ryukyus (as Okinawa was once known). I should also point out that Kiyoko does not refer to herself as the Queen of Okinawa although she has a decidedly regal bearing with a straight back; her hair held in a tight, imperious bun; and bold lavender lipstick.

  At her restaurant, Garamanjyaku, Kiyoko is serving us a multi-course ‘detox’ lunch. She had been inspired to develop this healthy alternative when a thirteen-year-old friend of her daughter’s dropped dead from a heart attack while playing baseball. This alerted her to the dietary horrors consumed by young Okinawans, which she has vowed to change.

  ‘I noticed teenagers eating all this fast food and additives. They looked healthy enough but they were not healthy inside so, over the last years, I started to use more and more herbal medicine in my cooking, and going back to the traditional diet,’ she tells us as we sit around the open hearth or ‘irori’.

  Kiyoko’s food uses only local ingredients and has its roots in Okinawan royal cuisine and the pre-war, Chinese medicine-influenced traditional diet of the islands in which specific foods are supposed to bring particular health benefits, or treat particular ailments (called yakuzen – or Chinese herbal medicine food). To this she has added her own, self-taught, Ayurvedic, macrobiotic spin. Okinawan royal cuisine usually features pork, but Kiyoko’s food is vegan, for instance. Her menu includes items such as ‘Enzyme juice of seaweeds’ and ‘Salad with lettuce, chia seeds and coconut oil’ and okra. Gwyneth Paltrow would love it.

  I am not at all convinced that any food has the power to cleanse or detoxify the body but, as I take a tentative sip of my purple foam drink, I grudgingly admit to myself that Garamanjyaku’s food – Sanskrit for ‘pure throat, good taste’ – is as likely a candidate as any.